Category: Dynamics 365

Omnichannel – Wave 2 2021

So last week the Wave 2 2021 information dropped. It’s taken me a few days to get round to it (family stuff happening), but I’m finally able to do a quick recap of it. As most people know, Microsoft releases features in two waves – one in the spring (Wave 1), and one in the autumn (Wave 2). As usual, I’ve included the links for the full release notes across both Dynamics 365 & Power Platform below, though will be focusing on the product features for Omnichannel

The links are here:

As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.

Enhancements to existing capabilities

Agent workspace inbox view

GA – Oct 2021

10 Google Workspace tips to optimize your inbox - Google Workspace Learning Center

As more and more organisations move in the direction of omnichannel system capabilities, there is a growing need for the actual agent experience to be better optimised. The inbox view that this functionality will deliver is aimed to address the needs to quickly triage requests, and allow agents to focus on customers & their issues. It will be integrated into the Customer Service workspace as well as the Omnichannel Engagement Hub, and will allow agents to effectively navigate their emails & conversions whilst handling customer interactions.

Usability improvements for agent workspaces

Early Access – Aug 2021. GA – Oct 2021

Web Usability Definition | Web Wise Wording

The Customer Service workspace and Omnichannel Engagement Hub are multi-session applications that allow users to be able to multi-task with customers to provide support on multiple cases simultaneously. This release provides usability improvements to help agents be more productive, including simplified navigation as well as the migration of productivity tools to the new extensible App side pane.

Increase agent productivity with contextual collaboration using embedded Microsoft Teams

GA – Nov 2021

How to Embed and Share Videos on Microsoft Teams | ClickView

Agents who use Dynamics 365 Customer Service can easily collaborate with anyone within their organization, such as agents from other departments, supervisors, customer service peers, or support experts, over Microsoft Teams to resolve customer issues, without leaving
the case or conversation. Chats over Teams will be linked directly to Customer Service records, enabling a contextual experience

Some of the key features coming in this release are:

  • Ability to chat with contacts from within Dynamics 365
  • Access to key Customer Service contacts, such as supervisors, queue members, and support experts.
  • Access to AI-driven suggestions of agents who resolved similar cases.
  • Access to recent Microsoft Teams chat lists.
  • Ability to link and unlink chats to case records.
  • Access to linked Microsoft Teams chats.
  • Message avatar and presence, where users can easily see profile pictures of a chat participant and their availability (presence)

Omnichannel Voice Channel

At Ignite in September 2020, Microsoft announced the new Voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The aim of the solution is to provide simpler administration & management experiences within the platform itself, rather then needing traditional cloud component integration complexities.

With the release of this, voice, SMS, and digital messaging channels, and a PVA-powered intelligent interactive voice response (IVR), real-time voice intelligence, and insights across all channels, speech-based self-service, and intelligent skills-based routing are all brought together in a single package.

Voice channel powered by Azure Communication Services

GA – Nov 2021

NEW Voice Channel Capabilities Announced for Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Preact

As mentioned in the Wave 1 2021 post, there’s a new voice channel that’s coming in. This new solution for Customer Service enables an all-in-one customer service solution without fragmentation or requirement of manual data integration. It will provide a single view of the customer that empowers agents to provide personalised service across all channels, and true omnichannel analytics and insights for agents and supervisors alike. Providing organizations with a choice of telephony delivered directly by Microsoft enables quick and easy deployment of a voice channel for their business.

  • This feature enables organizations to adopt Azure Communication Services as a voice provider natively in Omnichannel for Customer Service, and facilitates the following features:
  • Phone number procurement and management
  • Ability to handle and distribute incoming calls
  • Ability to make outbound calls
  • Ability to manage SMS (inbound and outbound)
  • Deep integration of voice into core Omnichannel for Customer Service functionality
  • Real-time sentiment analysis
  • Real-time transcription
  • Real-time translation
  • Real-time smart assist suggestions
  • Operations management through supervisor dashboards
  • Ability to record and manage phone call

Now there has been a slight delay in rolling this out. As a result, the GA dates for the below have been pushed back to Nov 2021:

  • Call intelligence
  • Call recording
  • Call transcription and real-time sentiment analysis
  • Consult and transfer
  • Direct outbound calling
  • Embedded analytics for voice channel
  • Intelligent voice bot via Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Bot Framework
  • Modern administration experience for Omnichannel voice (number management)
  • Modern administration for Omnichannel SMS via Communication Services (number management)
  • Supervisor monitoring and barge
  • Topic clustering for voice

Unified routing

Traditionally, organizations use “queue-based routing,” where incoming service requests are routed to a relevant queue, and agents work on those service requests by picking them from the queue. Organizations can miss service-level agreements if agents pick the easier service requests and leave the higher-priority requests in the queue. To address this scenario, organizations either create custom workflows to periodically distribute service requests among their agents or have dedicated personnel to distribute the service requests equitably among agents while adhering to organizational and customer preferences. Both methods are inefficient and error prone and necessitate continuous queue supervision.
The intelligent routing service in Customer Service uses a combination of AI models and rules to assign incoming service requests from all channels (cases, entities, chat, digital messages, and voice) to the best-suited agents. The assignment rules take into account customer-specified criteria, such as priority and auto-skills matching. The new routing service uses AI to classify, route, and assign work items with full automation, eliminating the need for constant queue supervision and manual work distribution to offer operational efficiencies for organizations

Improved historical analytics for unified routing scenarios

GA – Oct 2021

historical analysis on real-time data with ActivePivot

Administrators use unified routing and routing rules across the classification and assignment stages to help ensure the work item is assigned to the best suited agent. Embedded historical analytics provides an overview of routing performance of each channel to help optimize the routing strategy and improve the routing and workforce efficiency. Providing organizations a view of the effectiveness of configurations allows them to improve routing configurations to help increase their customer satisfaction and agent satisfaction scores.

Routing diagnostics for supervisors

GA – Oct 2021

Computer diagnostics icon (PSD) psd free file | Download now!

Routing diagnostics helps an organization to better understand the path a work item takes after it comes into the routing system, through all the classification and assignment rules, to ultimately land in a queue or be assigned to an agent. Current routing diagnostics are available for administrators and are more focused on the workstream and queue routing. In this release, routing diagnostics are being introduced to supervisor experiences, and the quality of the diagnostics is being improved.

I’m really quite excited to see how the new Voice channel will be received, as I think it’s a great feature addition to the overall tools available. It will be interesting to see how clients may choose to use it over their existing voice channel setup.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!

Troubleshooting the ‘Follow’ functionality

On a recent client project, we’ve come up against an interesting situation. Some of the users have the ‘Follow’ functionality available to them, but others don’t seem to have it. This, of course, is quite confusing, so I thought it would be good to write about it, for others who may come up against this.

But first, let’s take a step back. After all, before this had happened I had never heard of the ‘follow’ functionality within the system, and I’m quite sure that many others haven’t either! So what exactly is this all about?

What is ‘Follow’?

We’ve all been there – we have some customers who are ‘priority customers’, and we want to know/see everything that’s happening around them. Obviously we can go into their specific record/s, and see what’s going on. For example, seeing new cases added for these customers, other activities, etc. But what if we don’t want to have to manually open the records each time, or set up specific views in the system for them?

Well, this is where the Follow functionality comes in. It’s possible to track activities (in ‘real-time’) for records that a user follows. Microsoft has given us the ability to set this (or unset this) on a per record basis, so that users can set their own preferences within the system. When a user follows a specific record, the details for that record then show up in the users activity feed. This can then be used further, such as displaying it within a dashboard, for example.

Follow functionality through views
Follow functionality on a specific record

It’s also possible to automatically follow records based on specific criteria.

How to set up Follow functionality

In order for records to be able to have the follow functionality available to them, they need to have the Activity Feed enabled for the specific table. The default system tables such as Accounts, Contacts & Leads already have this enabled, so these records are able to be followed without any additional configuration around them.

To enable other tables (such as custom tables that you may have created) to be able to have the records within them followed, we need to carry out the following steps:

  1. Go to the Advanced Settings menu, and open Activity Feeds Configuration

2. Find the table that we’re wanting to configure this for (if it’s not showing up, click the ‘Refresh’ button on the menu)

Here we can see that the Channel table isn’t enabled at this point

3. Click the ‘Activate’ button on the menu bar

4. Confirm the pop up screen

And voila – you’re done! Users will now be able to go into the table/s, and follow (or unfollow) records there

Troubleshooting

So we now understand what the follow functionality is, and how to enable it. But what happens when users can’t actually see it within the system, to be able to use it?

Well, there are several different things that we can do to look to solve the issue:

  • Have activity feeds been configured for the table? If they’ve not been configured, then they’ll need to have this set up (this is why I’ve put the steps above as to how to do this!)
  • Are security roles set up correctly?

The second one is what turns out to have been the issue for this project. It’s been quite confusing, as originally mentioned, that certain users did see the follow functionality, but others users didn’t see it.

The first place to check is the ‘follow’ privileges on each security role:

As you can see above, we had given organisation-level access on the security role (& actually across all security roles), though the users were still having issues. So the next step is to check a different security privilege within the security role. This is the ‘Post Configuration’ setting, which is found under the Custom Entities section (why it’s under Custom, I have NO idea):

Without this enabled, users with the security role will NOT be able to see/use the follow functionality within the system!

Hopefully this should then sort out all issues, and users will be able to use the functionality as required.

Have you ever had issues with this feature? Have you found a different solution to fix it? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel Admin Center (Part II)

We’ve started off looking at the new Omnichannel Admin Center in Part I. I’m going to continue going through the wonderful new app (interface?), showcasing the functionality that’s different (there’s no point in me mentioning things that are the same, right?).

So having taken a look at the general overview, let’s start delving deeper into how it really is better!

Queues

Queues are really the backbone of Omnichannel. Customer interactions come through to a queue, where agents can then pick them up & respond. Without a queue, nothing would ever happen!

In the new interface, the functionality around queues has been extended. This is what the new interface looks like overall:

You’ll note that the default queues aren’t showing up in here. I’m not quite sure why that is, but am looking into it, and will post about it when I find out the reason behind it.

Opening up a queue record gives us the following:

I’m loving the cleanliness of the new layout – it’s something I’m probably going to keep saying! The new UI is just so much nicer on the eye, in my opinion. We have the information laid out well.

New users can be added from the ‘Add Users’ button on the right top, which is a pretty standard interface (ie adding new/existing records into a subgrid on a form).

But there are several new features here that weren’t present through the old interface. The first to talk about is the ability to set Operation Hours (the block at the bottom of the screenshot above). It’s great to see the prompt that if no operating hours are set, it’ll default to 24/7 operation.

Previously, it was a slight pain (ie clicking around a lot!) to get these to be associated. Now all we need to do is click the ‘Set Operation Hours’ button at the bottom of the page, and we can then add an existing record for this, or set up a new one:

Choosing an existing record will also give us the option to modify the settings for it:

One of the really nice things about this is the Assignment Method, which shows how work items will be prioritised. It’s possible change this, as well as create a NEW assignment method:

So quite a few additional functionality options available from the initial interface, rather than needing to click around. I’m liking it!

Workstreams

Just as with Queues, the Workstreams interface has been streamlined as well. One of the important things to note is that workstreams will need to be migrated over from the old interface to the new interface (I guess that there’s something happening behind the scenes?). I’m going to cover how to do this in a future post (stay tuned!), but let’s take a look the functionality in the new interface:

Clicking into a workstream record gives us the following information:

That’s already MUCH better laid out than the previous way, I think!

So let’s see what we have here. Well firstly, we’re able to move between the channels that are associated to the workstream. This is really helpful, as it can allow us to flip quickly backwards & forwards, and see the relevant information for each channel. We’re able to directly edit each individual channel just by clicking on it (loving the ‘fly out’ side screens for this!), and change the behaviour of it:

The abilities to quickly & rapidly do all of this is just wonderful, rather than needing to have a concrete understanding of the (complex) relationship structures within the system, and clicking around.

It’s also possible to add a new channel directly from this screen, which will easily walk (admin) users through setting up a new channel as needed:

Moving down the options available, we’re able to set routing rules, as well as work classifications. I’m going to talk about this in a separate post, but there’s some really interesting new capabilities here!

Looking at the Work Distribution information, we’re also able to view more information around this, as well as modify some of the settings available. Again, this comes in as a ‘fly out’ style window:

One of the neat pieces of functionality that has been slipped in is the ‘Keep same agent for entire conversation’ option. This means that if the customer interaction drops for some reason, & they come back, it can look for the same agent that they were chatting with previously, if it’s set as such.

Finally, we then have the ‘Advanced Settings’ tab, which gives us information around sessions, notifications, context variables, smart-assist bots, and quick replies. All of these are able to be viewed & configured directly from within the workstream, rather than needing to jump around different parts of the Omnichannel system, & then associating them together:

So to wrap up here (don’t worry, more to come shortly!), the new interface is really enabling admins to be able to quickly & easily create the necessary setup that’s needed. It’s avoiding needing to click around into different parts of the system. Omnichannel is complex enough as it is, and with being able to do the setup from one screen, it really makes life a LOT easier overall with getting the initial setup in place!

What are your thoughts on the new app? Have you used it yet? Have you found that it’s saving you time/effort? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Omnichannel Admin Center (Part I)

So there’s a new kid on the block. Or rather, it’s probably more accurate to say that there’s a new app available in Dynamics 365! This is the ‘Omnichannel Admin Center’ app that’s now present for anyone who currently has Omnichannel installed in their environment, or who is creating a new installation of Omnichannel.

So, what is this all about then?

Well, let’s back up a step here. Previously to set up Omnichannel, users had to go into the Dynamics 365 Settings, find the Omnichannel App, start the setup of it, and then go ahead & manually configure everything in the Omnichannel Administration app.

This, to be frank, took quite a bit of time to do, and needed users to be very familiar with the different parts of the interface. I’ve previously covered the (multiple) steps needed to do all of this in various blog posts, to help users understand what is actually needing to be done.

Thankfully, Microsoft realised the complexity around this, and have come out with a simplified administration experience. I’m very much in support of this, as it reduces the complexity of getting things started for Omnichannel in the first instance!

So let’s go ahead & take a look at this new app

The first thing to notice when opening the new Omnichannel Admin Center app is the interface itself. I think that this is really nice – rather than a ‘typical’ model-driven app experience, users are able to see some useful information on the home page itself!

Also, very nicely done in my opinion, are the three links at the bottom of the page:

  • Release Notes. This takes users to the release notes section on the Microsoft Docs website. It’s a great little thing that can help users understand the latest/greatest features that are being released
  • Ideas forum. People come up with great ideas to suggest to Microsoft to be able to include in their products. The Ideas forum is the location for these, where users can upvote popular concepts, or submit their own ideas. The Microsoft engineering teams do actually keep an eye on this!
  • Support community. The community forums are really helpful in allowing users to raise questions around the products, and give the ability for other users to help them out by giving answers etc. Most users will have already experienced the support forums in one way or another, but having a link directly to it is definitely quite useful to have

Now one thing that’s usually asked is ‘how can we quickly/easily see & set up chat in Omnichannel’? It’s one of the first things asked, as people tend to want to deploy (web)chat capabilities first, and then add other capabilities later on. Setting this up manually does take several steps, along with some waiting time (or, as I like to refer to it as, a coffee/snack break!)

It’s possible to quickly launch this through the button at the top of the page, rather than needing to go through the multiple configuration steps manually:

Click the button to launch it, and you’ll see the following window come up:

Clicking the ‘open chat demo’ will allow the system to start automatically configuring it for you – no more need for manual steps! You’re also able to use sample data if you wish to, to be able to show the experience without needing to load it in manually.

Yes, this really does only take a minute or two to happen!

Once the system has auto-configured everything, you’re now able to go ahead & launch the demo. Again, all the links & information are presented easily to us, telling/showing us what we need to do.

You’ll notice the chat widget in the lower right hand corner, which I’ve outlined in the image above. This launches into the chat widget directly, rather than needing to deploy it first to a webpage:

There’s no need to start needing to get into the setup of workstreams, queues, channels, routing capabilities, etc. It’s all configured right for you, to get you immediately started!

Of course, to test it out fully you’ll also need someone logged in as an Omnichannel Agent, to be able to respond to the chat instance. This could be the same user (in a different tab/browser on the same machine), or a different user on another machine. It’s really up to you as to how you would like to go about it.

So this is a really great feature to be able to have now. It’s not the ONLY great thing about the new app, however – stay turned for Part II next week when I’ll go into more capabilities that it provides!

Working with Opportunity Close table

I’ve recently had the experience of working with the Opportunity Close functionality within Dynamics 365, and given what occurred, thought it would be useful to document this so that others are able to see this as well. There are many scenarios in which we’d use this, and being able to give a comprehensive solution to clients does make all of the difference!

There are three areas that I’d like to cover:

  • Working with Opportunity Close table
  • Challenges with data
  • Power Automate to the rescue!
  • Caveats

So let’s get started then!

Thanks to various members of the community such as Matt Collins-Jones, Andrew Bibby & others, who helped me along the way

Working with Opportunity Close

The Opportunity Close functionality within Dynamics 365 (& yes, I’m going to refer to it as this, rather than Power Platform) is used to provide information around why an opportunity is being closed. This is regardless of whether the opportunity has been won, or it’s been lost. It’s still quite important to track the information around it, so that companies can understand better how the market views the products it offers, how it stacks up against others, etc.

The default path in the system is to create a lead, and then qualify it. Qualifying a lead then automatically creates an opportunity record, which further information (quotes, etc) can be entered against. An account record (if company information is specified) is also created:

Updated Solution Release: Lead Qualification Version 2.0.0 for Microsoft Dynamics 365

On the opportunity record, users are able to show if it’s been won or lost by clicking an appropriate button on the toolbar:

Doing this brings up the Opportunity Close pane on the right hand side of the screen:

Now it’s possible to customise this screen. In fact, the screenshot above shows 3 custom columns that have been added to it already in the system I was in.

To do this, we go to customise the solution (in the Maker Experience), and add the column/s that we’re wanting to:

Next, we need to remember to add it to the form! Otherwise it’s not going to show up. If we’re wanting it to appear on the side bar, then it’s important to customise the ‘Quick Create’ form version, to make our customisations show up.

Note: We’re able to put conditional visibility of the column/s if we want to, based on whether the opportunity is won or lost, using Business Rules. I haven’t done so in this scenario, but you’re obviously able to do so if you want to

Remember to save & publish the form, and then it’ll display within the system for users. Brilliant!

Challenges with data

So we’ve gone ahead & created the custom columns, and users are actually using them to record data. Wonderful – that’s exactly what we’ve been wanting to achieve.

OK – let’s now review the data so that we can see overall what’s happened with our opportunities. Of course we’re wanting to do this simply & easily, so we’ll open an Advanced Find window, go to the Opportunity Close table, add columns from the associated Opportunity, and….hold on. Opportunity Close ISN’T displaying in the Advanced Find????

It’s just NOT there. In case you’re wondering if you saved/published things correctly, or forgot some system setting, stop worrying. It’s not you – it’s the system.

See, Opportunity Close, though a table in its own right, is a SPECIAL sort of table. It doesn’t show up, and can’t be directly queried. I know – frustrating. I felt exactly the same way.

On digging deeper into things, I found out that there’s actually an activity record saved. It’s possible to query against this:

However, and this is the BIG catch, it’s NOT possible to return custom columns when carrying out this query. The search will ONLY return the (system) columns that are present for activities. So this leaves us with a problem.

Essentially, though we can set up custom columns to track the data that we’re needing to, it’s not possible (through the front end) to query it. This sort of negates what we’re trying to achieve here overall, and is a pain.

So what’s the way round it? Well, it’s actually going to be Power Automate!

Power Automate to the rescue

In order to handle our issue, what we need to do is the following:

  • Add custom columns to the Opportunity table (these should mimic the custom columns that we’ve added to the Opportunity Close table)
  • Use Power Automate for automation purposes!

The first step is easy. We need to go & create custom columns on the Opportunity table. These WILL show up in the Advanced Find search. They obviously need to be the same as the custom columns on the Opportunity Close table. If we’ve used Choice or Choices there, point the Opportunity column to the same source (it’s a good argument for using Global, rather than Local, choice/s).

We then can go and create a Power Automate. This should trigger when an Opportunity Close record is created.

Note: For this, I’ve made it so that it runs under the user triggering the action, rather than a system account. This is to keep in line with licensing limits etc

You’ll then need to add a ‘Get Dataverse row’ step, and get the Opportunity Close record that has just been created. This is annoying, but for some strange reason the trigger doesn’t present the custom columns/values in the JSON that it returns. Hopefully Microsoft fixes this at some point, but for the moment, we need to work around it.

The last step is to add a ‘Update Dataverse row’. This should point to the Opportunity table, & we can simply map the values across (from the SECOND step, NOT the first one – VERY IMPORTANT).

Once this is all done, save & test it, and you should see it working. I generally don’t add the Opportunity custom columns to the form, but rather leave them for querying against.

Caveats

It’s important to keep in mind that when an opportunity is marked as either won or lost, it’s then closed, and changed to a read-only state. That’s how the system is designed to be, and makes sense.

However it’s ALSO possible to re-activate a closed opportunity, and then close it again. Ie a single Opportunity record could have multiple Opportunity Close records against it. This solution won’t handle this (it would need to be built out further – the Opportunity record itself will only show the values from the latest Opportunity Close action, so please do keep this in mind!

Have you ever come up against something like this? How have you handled it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment!

Branding Omnichannel Chat Widget

One of the most basic functions of Omnichannel is the humble chat widget. This lovely little feature is there to be embedded on a webpage. People browsing the website can see it in the corner (or wherever it’s placed), and can then click on it to get help from a customer service person.

When clicked on, the chat window immediately opens, and people can connect to a live advisor. As mentioned previously, it’s also possible to add initial questions to the interface for the customer to fill out, and the information is then provided to the customer service agent.

All of this is wonderful. However, companies are now, more than ever, conscious of their branding. And by branding, I’m not just referring to a corporate logo. Businesses will often have colour schemes that are globally identified with them, along with fonts as well. Think of Coca Cola, for instance. The cursive script used is identifiable wherever you are in the world, even when it’s written in a different language, or the other way around!

With the default system customisation options, the chat widget itself is able to be pointed to a logo to be used in it. However further customisations and options, such as the colour scheme, are limited to pre-set options. So what happens if a company wishes to extend this further, and keep things in line with their corporate image?

Well, thankfully due to some extended development tools, this is able to be done. Below, I’m going to set out some of the functionality that is available through the usage of different scripts that can be added to the webpage within the chat widget code, which will then enhance it even further.

Pop out mode

It’s great to have the chat widget on the same screen, down in the corner somewhere. But what if you’re wanting to have it pop out, and present in a different window? It’s not possible through the default configuration, but it is possible through the usage of code. Simply adding the following line before the ‘></script’ tag at the end of the code block, we get to see this happen:

data-open-in-window="true"

It’s also possible to set the tag to “false”, which will then obviously not pop it open in a new window, but will keep it within the widget itself.

Font options

Not only are we able to pop out the chat window, we’re also able to use custom fonts. Again, the default font options leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. Given the wide range of fonts being able to be used on websites nowadays, it’s definitely very nice to be able to use more fonts for the chat widget itself. I’d be slightly cautious here against being too ‘wild’ with them, as obviously we want to ensure that they’re accessible for all, and not difficult to read for some people.

Adding the following code snippet before the ‘></script’ tag at the end of the code block will make this happen. Note that we do need to specify the font that we’re wanting to use, though not all fonts may be available on website pages:

data-font-family-override="Stencil; Segoe UI"

Also bear in mind that different browsers may have compatibility issues with more advanced fonts, along with mobile devices, so I’d advise to be careful here. Ensure that you do test this out as widely as you can. There is also a second option font that can be used, in the case where the main font that you’ve specific is not available.

Custom colours

The final piece of customisation that I’d like to mention (at least for the purposes of this blog post) is around colours. Again, there are only a few pre-set colours available to pick from for the chat widget interface, which is a shame. For this, I’d definitely have expected to see the ability to select more colours, or have a colour picker/HEX value column available to use. After all, if it’s possible to do this in Microsoft Word (or other programs), why not Dynamics 365?

So again, there’s a nifty little code segment that can be added to the chat widget code script on the webpage. This requires you you know the HEX value for the colour that you’re wanting (if you don’t know this off the top of your head, there are free tools out there that can easily and quickly provide it to you).

data-color-override="#174F15

Personally, I think that the colour option is the best one to go for, as you can immediately utilise any custom colours that your branding contains!

Overall, I think that these are really great, and as you can see, I’ve played around with them for my own environment!

Have you ever had a need to customise something like this, but faced challenges? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Solution Dependencies & Management

Solutions are marvellous things. They enable us to be able to package up lots of components, and deploy them to different environments all together as one single package.

However, there have been changes over time as to how solutions are used. I’m not (for the most part) going to go into the Managed VS Unmanaged debate, which I leave to people who are more in the know….

Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps are installed using solutions. Third party apps provided by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) also use solutions.

In Power Apps, solutions are leveraged to transport apps and components from one environment to another or to apply a set of customisations to existing apps. A solution can contain one or more apps as well as other components such as entities, option sets, etc. You can get a solution from AppSource or from an independent software vendor (ISV).

Custom development should also take place within a solution, to allow it to be deployed appropriately.

But it’s important to take a closer look at how solutions work overall, as we can be involved on multiple projects within the same environment. Not only that, some solutions may require other solutions to be present first, in order to actually work! A great example of this is Master Data Management (or MDM), which is where companies have a ‘backbone’ of data, which other parts of the system then hangs off.

To understand this concept better, let’s take a quick look at solution layering.

Solution Layering

Layering occurs on the import of solutions and describes the dependency chain of components from the root solution introducing it, through each solution that extends or changes the components behaviours. Layers are created through an extension of an existing component (taking a dependency on it) or creation of a new component or version of a solution

Managed and unmanaged solutions exist at different levels within a Microsoft Dataverse environment. In Dataverse, there are two distinct layer levels:

  • Unmanaged layer. All imported unmanaged solutions and unmanaged customizations exist at this layer. The unmanaged layer is a single layer.
  • Managed layers. All imported managed solutions and the system solution exist at this level. When multiple managed solutions are installed, the last one installed is above the managed solution installed previously. This means that the second solution installed can customize the one installed before it. When two managed solutions have conflicting definitions, the runtime behaviour is either “Last one wins” or a merge logic is implemented. If you uninstall a managed solution, the managed solution below it takes effect. If you uninstall all managed solutions, the default behaviour defined within the system solution is applied. At the base of the managed layers level is the system layer. The system layer contains the tables and components that are required for the platform to function.

The following diagram introduces how managed and unmanaged solutions interact with the system solution to control application behavior.

  • The system solution represents the solution components defined within Dynamics 365 or the Power Platform. Without any managed solutions or customisations, the system solution defines the default application behaviour. Many of the components in the system solution are customisable and can be used in managed solutions or unmanaged customisations.
  • Managed solutions are installed on top of the system solution and can modify any customisable solution components or add more solution components. Managed solutions can also be layered on top of other managed solutions. As long as a managed solution enables customization of its solution components, other managed solutions can be installed on top of it and modify any customisable solution components that it provides.
  • Unmanaged customisations. All customisable solution components provided by the system solution or any managed solutions can be customized in the unmanaged customisations
  • Unmanaged solutions are groups of unmanaged customisations. Any unmanaged customized solution component can be associated with any number of unmanaged solutions. These can be edited & modified, regardless of the environment in which they’ve been deployed to
  • The ultimate behaviour of an instance of Dynamics 365 or Power Platform application is the culmination of the system solution, any managed solutions, and any unmanaged customisations.

The official stance of Microsoft, according to its Application Lifecyle Management (ALM) documentation, is that unmanaged solutions are used for development, and that managed solutions are released downstream to further environments. For bespoke solutions, however, this may not fit, and an appropriate balance must be found.

Data ‘Backbone’ & Solution Dependencies

Given the way that companies are adopting Power Platform (and Dynamics 365, of course!) it’s highly likely that we will build out system structures that will form the backbone for multiple applications on an on-going basis. With this in mind, it’s appropriate to put in place proper planning for this, to avoid any issues that could occur in the future with appropriate system designs

Solution Dependencies

When creating system structures within an environment, using unmanaged solutions, connecting two (or more) tables together will create dependencies on each other. In simple terms, if we connect Table A to Table B, there’s a reciprocal relationship created back from Table B to Table A:

This happens even if Table A is in Solution 1, and Table B is in Solution 2. If they’re in the same environment (& both solutions are unmanaged), it will create the two-way dependency.

This will cause issues if trying to deploy each solution individually, and will fail on import, as the system will require all items to be available in the solution

Workable scenario

The way in which to handle the issue of solution dependencies is to ensure that the ‘master backbone’ of system design is created in the main development environment, and then to use that in secondary development environments as the core of additional solutions:

This is in line with the emerging recent Microsoft Best Practise information around solution management (which is likely to be moving towards having a single environment per developer, rather than multiple developers working in the same environment).

The steps for doing this are as follows:

  1. Main ‘core solution’ exists (as unmanaged) within the main development environment
  2. When a project requires this to build upon:
    1. Secondary development environment is created
    1. ‘Core solution’ is exported as managed from the main development environment, & imported into the secondary development environment
    1. Project work is carried out within the secondary development environment
    1. Once project solution is complete (or when appropriate for deployment), it can be exported from the secondary development environment
      1. If deploying directly from the secondary development environment to downstream environments, it should be exported as managed
    1. The solution should be exported as unmanaged, and imported back into the main development environment. This will not cause dependencies to be created with the ‘core solution’ in it

Note: The main ‘core solution’ should consist of the items that are needed for core system work. If additional items are needed for multiple projects to work off (eg Account Manager field), this would need to be added to the core solution, rather than the individual project solution/s, as otherwise there could be further issues downstream.

If the project is completed, but requires further work to be carried out later on (or development support), then the following should be done:

  1. Secondary development environment is created
  2. ‘Core solution’ exported from the main development environment as a managed solution, and imported into the secondary development environment
  3. Project solution exported as unmanaged from the main development environment, and imported into the secondary development environment
  4. Work and/or support can be carried out within the secondary development environment, and released appropriately

I’m expecting further information around this to be released by Microsoft in due course (I’m a little surprised there’s not more out there at the moment, to be honest!). It’s vital that we ensure that we’re working with solutions in the right way, to stop any issues occurring later on down the line.

Have you ever had a problem around this? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear your experiences!

MB-910: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps

So here’s the thing. There used to be the MB-900 exam, which was the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fundamentals exam. This was aimed at people who had a small knowledge of Dynamics 365, and it was really the base/entry-level exam into the qualifications for it.

However, Dynamics 365 is actually comprised of two ‘parts’. There’s the ‘front office’ part that’s usually referred to as Customer Engagement (well, depending on how Microsoft wish to refer to it as, which can change from time to time!), and there’s the ‘back office’ part, which is the ERP side of things. This is the finance & operations sphere, where those functions take place.

The MB-900 was a slightly strange exam, in my opinion, because it covered both. There were questions around things like Sales, Customer Service, etc, but there were also Supply Chain Management questions as well, for example. Now I’m not saying that people shouldn’t know about both ‘sides’ of the equation, but people usually (for the most part) handle one or the other. It’s generally unusual to find someone knowledgeable about both.

Furthermore, if we take a look at the more in-depth exams in the MB range, we find that there’s a definitive split there. The MB-2xx series cover Customer Engagement, whereas the MB-3xx series covers the ERP side of things. So it’s definitely not the norm to have both sides included in a single exam.

Microsoft came to the realisation around this, and have therefore decided to update the Fundamentals space. In doing this, they’ve split things out. There’s the MB-910 exam (which is what this post is about), and the MB-920 exam, which focuses specifically on the ERP space. A good move, in my opinion..

The MB-910 launched this past weekend, and I took it around a day after it went live. Let’s go take a look at it, and recap my experience with it.

The official description of the exam is:

This exam covers the features and capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer engagement apps.

Candidates for this exam should have general knowledge of or relevant working experience in an Information Technology (IT) environment. They should also have a fundamental understanding of customer engagement principles and business operations.

Taking it leads to the qualification for ‘Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Customer Engagement Apps (CRM)’.

The description around the qualification is:

If you’re familiar with business operations, customer relationship management (CRM), and are IT savvy—either generally or through work experience—take advantage of this certification to highlight those skills. Validate your broad exposure to the customer engagement capabilities of Dynamics 365 to enhance your career journey.

People in different roles and at various stages in their careers can benefit from this fundamentals certification. Here are some examples:

IT professionals who want to show a general understanding of the applications they work with

Business stakeholders and others who know Dynamics 365 and who want to validate their skills and experience

Developers who want to highlight their understanding of business operations and CRM

Students, recent graduates, and people changing careers who want to leverage Dynamics 365 customer engagement capabilities to move to the next level

The official page for the exam is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-910 where it gives quite a good overview of things. Go take a look at it, and also take a look at the associated learning paths.

Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). This is the way that I now usually take exams (even if I could go to an exam centre, I think that I’d be unlikely to, given the travel/time needed!). Checking in for the exam went without issues (the process definitely seems to be getting smoother each time), and I was ready to go within a few minutes.

As in my previous exam posts, I’m going to stress that it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else! ). I’ve tried to group things together as best as possible for the different subject areas.

  • Project Operations
    • Scheduling resources
    • Entering project time/costs
    • Skills
    • Roles
    • Different types of project costings
  • Customer Service
    • SLA’s, what they are, which ones to use
    • Omnichannel, including capabilities and channel functions/availabilities
    • Power Virtual Agents
  • Sales
    • Lead processes, deactivating & reactivating
    • Opportunity processes
    • LinkedIn Sales Navigator. How it interacts, which capabilities it has within it, how it works
    • Quotes. How they work, what’s required to handle them, document generation
  • Marketing
    • Website forms
    • Automation around responses
    • A/B testing
    • Event management
  • Field Service
    • Work orders
    • Route optimization
    • Scheduling boards
  • Document options
    • Attachments that users can access within the system, as well as outside of Dynamics 365
    • File collaboration tools, and integration with them
  • Timelines & activities
  • System currencies, default options, additional currencies, and updating them
  • Understanding different types of tables, and when you’d use each one
  • Reporting capabilities
    • How data is able to be reported on
    • Report Builder Wizard
    • Reporting on data held in Dataverse
    • Reports in dashboards
    • Usage of Power BI, including data gateways

I was slightly surprised with the level of detail in some of the areas. I wasn’t, for example, expecting the emphasis on Project Operations and Field Service that came up for me. Some of the level of detail seemed more fitting for an MB-2xx exam than this Fundamentals exam.

In a similar vein, I also wasn’t expecting Power BI and Power Automate so much. Perhaps that’s just my own perspective, though obviously with the Power Platform it would be there. However there is a PL-900 exam, around Power Platform capabilities, that I’d expect those sorts of questions to be in, rather than here in this exam.

Otherwise I think that it was generally on point for what I’d expect to find at this level of exam. The questions have definitely evolved over time, and I found myself giving more consideration to answers than I would have on the previous version.

It’s a good place to start for people who are looking to get qualified around Dynamics 365! If you do decide to take it, please drop a comment below to let me know how it was for you – I’d love to hear about your experience!

Omnichannel – Wave 1 2021

Today is a day that I’ve been looking forward to over the last few days. Leaving aside anything else that may be happening, it’s the day when the 2021 Wave 1 Release Notes come out! These cover the new functionality & features that will be released during the first half of 20201 for both Dynamics 365 & Power Platform.

The links are here:

There’s an amazing amount of functionality, but what I want to focus on specifically are the capabilities coming down the line around Omnichannel for Customer Service

As I’ve done before, I’m going to include the dates that are applicable (at this point in time) for each time.

Enhancements to existing capabilities

Embedded analytics for Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

10 Great Google Analytics Alternatives

Traditional dashboards have limited interactive capabilities and provide a narrow view into the overall organization. Omnichannel’ s Embedded analytics for chat and digital messaging allows service managers to identify problem areas and opportunities to improve from historical data, along with rich slice and dice capabilities powered by Power BI.

With this release, the embedded analytics for chat and digital messaging allows service managers to understand how agents and queues are performing. The analytics provide trends based on problem areas and opportunities allowing the service managers to analyze the corrective measures they can take, provide appropriate guidance to agents, and improve the customer support experience. Key Insights cards provide a glimpse into the notable trends on core metrics and topics that are important for a supervisor to further investigate the analytics.

Enhanced supervisor experiences for operational monitoring of Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

How Can I Use Microsoft SCOM for End-to-End Performance Monitoring – eG Innovations

Supervisors need key metrics and channel-specific performance measures to take operational decisions to meet and exceed service-level goals

  • As contact centres deploy multiple channels to provide an omnichannel experience in customer service, supervisor can view and track relevant metrics for operational efficiency in the following ways:
  • Equip team leads to monitor channel-specific performance metrics to handle agents who are dedicated to a single channel
  • Enable senior team leads and service delivery managers to monitor All-up metrics across all channels
  • Capability to quickly switch between the views

Historical topic clustering for all channels

GA – April 2021

Topics | National Museum of African American History and Culture

Topics are automatically generated using AI to organize similar issues into groups. By aggregating metrics from issues grouped into the same topic, organizations get a full view of KPIs and metric impact for each topic. For example, organisations can view the average handling time, sentiment, and CSAT for a specific topic, and whether the topic is a key driver for any of those metrics.

Modern Administration Experience for Omnichannel Chat and Digital Messaging

GA – April 2021

Modern - Responsive Admin Dashboard Template by stacks | ThemeForest

With the modern administration experience, administrators can easily start the first chat conversation with only a few clicks and see the immediate value of chat conversation powered by Omnichannel for Customer Service. The modern administration experience is intuitive to follow and allows administrators to quickly understand and perform the configuration steps.

Introducing the first run experience to help administrators automatically set up the chat channel and start the first chat conversation. Also, introducing the modern administration experience to guide administrators to set up the end-to-end configurations in Omnichannel for Customer Service.
The key highlights of this feature include:

  • First run experience of chat channel
  • Streamlined and simplified administration user experience of work stream, queue, and global setting configurations for digital messaging channels

Omnichannel Voice Channel

At Ignite in September 2020, Microsoft announced the new Voice channel for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. The aim of the solution is to provide simpler administration & management experiences within the platform itself, rather then needing traditional cloud component integration complexities.

With the release of this, voice, SMS, and digital messaging channels, and a PVA-powered intelligent interactive voice response (IVR), real-time voice intelligence, and insights across all channels, speech-based self-service, and intelligent skills-based routing are all brought together in a single package.

This feature is currently in invite-only private preview, with general availability planned as part of the April 2021 wave

Call intelligence

GA – August 2021

What is call intelligence, and why should you care?

The transcript of a call and an in-depth analysis of a particular call recording can help an organization better understand how the engagement with the customer progressed and present opportunities for agent training.

Through historical analytics, supervisors will be able to drill into a particular call to view more details. Each call will include voice-specific metrics such as talk-to-listen ratio, talking speed and more. Supervisors can also see the detailed sentiment throughout the call, shown alongside the transcript for further analysis. This view helps supervisors better understand how the call went and identify the areas to improve.

  • This capability leverages the call transcription and sentiment analysis to produce the following metrics:
  • Talking speed
  • Switches per hour
  • Pause before speaking
  • Longest customer monologue

Call Recording

GA – August 2021

Call Recording | MightyCall

Customer service agents typically need to review phone calls with customers. Call recording allows agents to record phone calls between agents and customers. This helps the organization to revisit the interaction to better understand the customer’s issues in his or her own words and increase the possibility of resolving the customer’s problems or questions. Call recordings are also helpful for training scenarios where an organization can share examples of great customer interactions among the team.

Call Transcription and Realtime Sentiment Analysis

GA – August 2021

Jog.ai | Supercharge Your Call Notes | Automated Call Recording and Transcription

Customer service agents often need to take notes while helping customers during a phone call. Call transcription converts a phone conversation into written words reducing the amount of notes an agent will need to take and helping with accessibility. Furthermore, sentiment analysis examines the conversation and identifies the general sentiment or “mood” of the customer like if they are slightly angry or very disappointed. Call transcription and sentiment analysis are both used by the system to proactively analyse cases and provide agents with suggestions to resolve the issue.

Call transcription converts a phone conversation into written words and stores them as plain text in real time as the call is in progress. Sentiment analysis, built on award winning AI, tags a sentiment on the top of a conversation, and is constantly updated as the conversation evolves.
Both call transcription and sentiment analysis are included out-of-the-box with no additional setup or configuration.

Consult and transfer

GA – August 2021

Voip Call Transfer - Voip Service - Voip Business | VoIP Business

Omnichannel for Customer Service offers customer service agents the ability to easily consult with and transfer calls to other customer service representatives and helps agents have a greater chance to resolve customer issues.

While on a call with a customer, an agent can put the customer on hold and consult with another agent or manager on an issue that requires specific expertise. issue perhaps one with specific expertise or a manager. Agents can also transfer the call to a specific customer service agent, which is also referred to as a warm transfer. In other scenarios, the agent can transfer the call to a queue from where it is routed to the best available agent based on rules configured by your business.

Direct outbound calling

GA – August 2021

Outbound Calling Strategy- the Best Way to Boost Communication

The ability of agents to contact customers via voice calling remains one of the most important customer interaction methods in Customer Service. Direct outbound calling enables agents to contact customers using our native fully integrated voice channel based on Azure Communication Services, where voice is just another channel for agents and supervisors.

Agents can contact customers using voice calling. Direct outbound calls can be initiated via click-to-call directly from phone number fields in the following:

  • Cases
  • Customer profiles
  • Call back activities
  • Ongoing chat conversations
  • Via a phone dialler

Outbound calls are displayed as conversations in conversation history contextually per case/customer and timelines. Supervisors can monitor outbound calls just like any other customer interaction.

This feature includes the following key highlights:

  • Fully integrated outbound voice channel without third party voice integration
  • Sample outbound voice channel configured automatically on voice channel provisioning.
  • Easy channel administration within the Omnichannel admin experience.
  • Outbound voice conversations are just another conversation type in Omnichannel.
  • Supervisors can monitor outbound calls from within the ongoing conversations dashboard like any other agent/customer interaction.

Embedded analytics for voice channel

GA – August 2021

How to Utilize Google Analytics to Improve Your Restaurant's Website

Traditional dashboards have limited interactive capabilities and provide a narrow view into the overall organization. With historical data, embedded analytics for voice channel empowers service managers to identify problem areas and opportunities to improve and provides rich slice and dice capabilities powered by Power BI.

Customer service managers or supervisors are responsible for managing the agents who work to resolve customer queries every day through phone channel. With this release, the embedded analytics provide trends over a period to understand how agents and queues are performing, so that service managers can take corrective measures, provide appropriate guidance to agents, and improve the customer support experience. Key Insights cards provide an “at a glance” view into notable trends on core metrics and topics that are important for a supervisor to investigate further in the comprehensive reports. Agent-focused views display core metrics to better understand the primary areas an agent worked in and identify opportunities for coaching.

  • With these views, supervisors can:
  • Monitor operational metrics, such as inbound calls, calls handled, abandon rate, average talk time, and average speed to answer calls, across channels, queues, agents, and topics
  • Monitor support quality through sentiment analysis across channels, queues, agents, and topics.

Intelligent voice via PVA and Azure Bot Framework

GA – August 2021

How Intelligent Voice Agents Can Replace Costly Contact Centers

With speech-enabled Power Virtual Agents, businesses can empower business users to build and update intelligent voice bots that use built-in natural language processing capabilities to engage conversationally with customers and provide personalized self-service always. Bots can be built once and deployed across messaging and voice channels for maximum efficiency and consistency. For more advanced scenarios, businesses can integrate bots built with the Microsoft Bot Framework to work on the voice channel.

With this feature, businesses have a familiar bot authoring experience for all customer service bots, across messaging and voice. Customers will enjoy with flexible, free-form service experiences, instead of inflexible menu trees. Bots can easily hand off the call to humans agents, with the conversation history and context gathered by the bot. This allows Omnichannel for Customer Service to route the customer from the bot to the best available live agent to provide a seamless, contextual hand off.
The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Enable Power Virtual Agents and Azure Bot Framework bots to provide intelligent voice bots on the voice channel
  • Support for built in dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) as a secondary means to interact with the bot
  • Transfer calls to human agents with full transcript and context
  • Use bots for post-call surveys

Modern Administration Experience for Omnichannel Voice (Number Management)

GA – August 2021

Typically, customer service organizations must manually integrate standalone telephony and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, which results in fragmented experiences and error-prone data integration. Administrators need to manage resources and phone numbers in the telephony provider’s app and manually bring over this information to the CRM solution. Very often, this setup process requires collaboration between business and IT administrators, adding delay to an already lengthy process. With the availability of Azure Communication Services, Omnichannel for Customer Service now offers native voice channel. This all-in-one solution empowers business administrators to independently deploy a telephony resource and acquire phone numbers in a few steps, offering a fast and consistent experience.

Until now, administrators created resources and managed phone numbers in a separate telephony application and then manually deployed the numbers in the CRM solution. The long-fragmented process is inconsistent and requires continuous maintenance to keep both applications in sync.
With the native voice channel, business administrators can deploy the telephony resource and acquire phone numbers without leaving the Omnichannel Administration app.

The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Telephony resource deployment using connection string or sign into Azure account.
  • Acquiring phone numbers of various types and plans.
  • Releasing phone numbers.

Modern Administration for Omnichannel SMS via ACS (Number Management)

GA – August 2021

Typically, customer service organizations must manually integrate standalone telephony and CRM solutions, resulting in fragmented experiences and error-prone manual data integration. Administrators need to manage resources and phone numbers in the telephony provider’s app and manually bring over this information to the CRM solution. Very often, this setup process requires collaboration between business and IT administrators, adding more delay to an already long process. With the availability of Azure Communication Services, Omnichannel for Customer Service now offers native new voice channel. This all-in-one solution empowers business administrators to independently deploy a telephony resource and acquire phone numbers in a few steps, offering a fast and consistent experience.

Until now, administrators created resources and managed phone numbers in a separate telephony application and then manually deployed the numbers in the CRM solution. The long-fragmented process is inconsistent and requires continuous maintenance to keep both applications in sync.
With the native voice channel, business administrators can deploy the telephony resource and acquire phone numbers without leaving the Omnichannel Administration app.

The key highlights of this feature include:

  • Telephony resource deployment using connection string or sign into Azure account.
  • Acquiring phone numbers of various types and plans.
  • Releasing phone numbers.

Supervisor monitoring and barge

GA – August 2021

Call Monitoring – Understanding this Tool in the Call Centre

Service managers are responsible for the overall quality of customer service and often need to observe customer service representatives while they are on the phone with customers. Omnichannel for Customer Service allows supervisors to listen in on phone conversations and join a conversation, if needed. This helps supervisors increase the likelihood of resolving customer issues, enforce proper business practices, and identify training opportunities.

When supervisors log into the application, they are provided a list of phone calls that are in progress. From the list, they can choose to join a call with the option to join anonymously as a hidden participant. If they want to intervene, they can join the call, referred to as “barging”, which then becomes a group call.

Topic Clustering for Voice

GA – August 2021

Topics are automatically generated using AI to organize similar issues into groups. By aggregating metrics from issues grouped into the same topic, organizations get a full view of KPIs and metric impact for each topic. For example, organizations can view the average handling time, sentiment, and CSAT for a specific topic, and whether the topic is a key driver for any of those metrics.

Topics, which represent semantically similar support issues, help organizations better identify and respond to issues their customers are facing. Correlating these topics along with core historical analytics makes it quick and easy for a supervisor to see common issues by volume, CSAT impact and new cases, helping to identify where they should invest their time.
In this release, the same capability will now be applied to voice channel, generating topics off of the transcript. This will help organizations better understand issues that customers face and their impact on core business metrics across the spectrum of engagement.

I’m really quite excited to see how the new Voice channel will be received, as I think it’s a great feature addition to the overall tools available. It will be interesting to see how clients may choose to use it over their existing voice channel setup.

I’ll be looking deeper into the different functionalities, and will share them here. If there’s anything you think would be helpful to focus on, drop a comment & let me know!

Managed Solutions, & replacing a field

Well to start with, I’m sure that I’m going to get pulled up by some people for my use of the word ‘field’ in the title. After all, officially it’s now a ‘column’! But I (still) can’t let go of calling them as I’ve done so for over a decade, so field it is.

Now to the actual topic of this blog post, which is centred around Managed Solutions. Leaving aside the whole debate about whether we should be using managed or unmanaged solutions (& when/where to do each), there is one definitive benefit of using a managed solution.

See, unmanaged solutions are additive in nature. Work is done in the development environment, then deployed. Further work is done (additional items added, etc), and deployed, and they then appear in the downstream environments. However, if you delete an item in the development environment, it’s not removed when the solution is deployed downstream.

Managed solutions, on the other hand, are both additive & detractive. As with unmanaged solutions, items added in the development environment are also added downstream when deployed. However, if an item is removed from the solution in the development environment, it will also be removed when the solution is deployed downstream. It’s one of the useful ways to ensure that you don’t end up with random unused items just lying around in Production (which have a habit then of popping up in the Advanced Find window, for example). So it’s really quite handy for a lot of reasons to go down this route.

Well, I found myself going down this route recently, but with slightly unexpected results, I’ll freely admit…

The scenario was that we had deployed a managed solution to the UAT (test) environment on a client project. Then the client changed their mind (shock & horror!!) as to a specific item, and we needed to change it from a text item to a lookup item. Obviously (as per best practise, of course) this would need to be done in the development environment, and then released downstream. Given that this is a managed solution, I’d expect this to work, without any issues. Well, it didn’t…

The change in the development environment (deleted the old item, ‘re-created’ it as a lookup with the same system name) was done, we exported it as managed, and then went to import it in the UAT environment. It took the solution file, thought about it for a while (it’s somewhat of a large solution), & then errored:

Exception type: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault] Message: Attribute mdm_field is a String, but a Lookup type was specified.

Now I was somewhat confused by this message occurring. It’s not been the first time I’ve seen it over the years, but in my previous experience I’ve seen it when handling unmanaged solutions. It’s when you delete an item in the development environment, re-create it as a different item type (with the same underlying system name), and then deploy it as unmanaged. The solution import in the second environment fails due to the different in the type (as it sees the same name). This, of course, is to be expected.

But here we’ve been using managed solutions for deployment, and as mentioned above, they’re detractive as well. The expected behaviour (at least from my side of things) would be that the system would note that the item type has changed, remove the old item, & import the new item. In my mind, that’s logical, but apparently not?

See, even managed solutions have their limitations, of which this is one of them. Having checked with several other people who I reached out to around this, I’ve discovered that it can’t work in the way that I was expecting it to. Instead, a specific process has to be followed

  1. In the development environment, remove the item, & export the solution as managed
  2. In the downstream environment(s), deploy this (interim) managed solution. This will remove the item from the environments
  3. In the development environment, re-create the item with the different system type. Then export it as managed
  4. In the downstream environments, deploy this solution. This will then add the item (with the new system type) into the environment.

This means that development & deployment teams (if separate ones) need to co-ordinate around this, to ensure it’s done in the right way. It could also be developed/exported in succession, and then imported in succession as well (either manually, or through an Azure DevOps Pipeline, for example).

This worked wonderfully for us, and to be honest, I was quite relieved after several hours of frustration with things. Even better, it was a Friday, so meant that the week could end well!

Have you ever come across this, and been frustrated as well? Have you got a similar story with something else that happened to you around solutions? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!